Razib, what an excellent write up of one of the more colourful people in South Africa. In terms of genetics, how do they relate to the St Helenans? I would assume that there existed a fair share of history between the port of Cape Town and the island of St Helena.
What do you think the future of the Cape Coloured are in South Africa? Do you think eventually as an ethnic group they’ll seize to be?

Despite all this, he received an obscene number of awards and honors because of obsequious virtue signaling. (Did Ted Kaczynski ever get an honorary degree or have a street named after him? How about Timothy McVeigh?) If all that wasn’t enough, the Robben Island prison where Mandela stayed became a World Heritage Site.

If critics in Britain had been fully cognizant of the challenges awaiting the immigrants, hostility to the scheme might have been more pronounced. Booster literature conveniently failed to mention that the farm plots assigned to the settlers were intended to serve as a buffer between “more established western regions of the colony” and amaXhosa and amaThembu communities further east, African polities who had recently lost the territory to European commandoes (Pereira and Chapman xiv). In other words, the 1820 settlers (as they came to be known) were to be situated within a region that had recently undergone “ethnic cleansing” (Vigne xiv), a former “contact zone” between colonial troops and local African groups, sides who had already engaged in a series of frontier wars (Pratt 6). To make matters more complicated, most of the new arrivals, while soon to be engaged in a monumental agrarian endeavor, were merely “tradesmen, artisans [and] mechanics” from Britain’s industrial towns and cities, some of whom “passed themselves off as rural folk, and sailed to South Africa with grand dreams of finding a natural paradise that would support them with little effort” (Mostert 520). Yet even if the settlers had been adequately prepared for the rigors of agricultural development, some experts (Burchell notwithstanding) believed that the region chosen for settlement—known as the Zuurveld or “sour field” in Cape Dutch—was “unsuited for crop-farming” (Pereira and Chapman xiv). The plots were thought to be too small, rainfall was often unpredictable or scarce, and the soil retained an abnormally high level of acidity, “which is harmful, even fatal, to cattle in autumn and winter” (Giliomee 293). From performing the most ordinary tasks, then, all the way up the chain of the imperial command, the 1820 settlement scheme appeared somewhat precarious. “The operation,” as one historian recently put it, “was probably the most callous act of mass settlement in the entire history of empire” (Mostert 533).